I Expected Better!

There was a paper published within the last few days makes the claim that anthropoid
primates diversified initially in Asia and then moved into Africa from there instead of the other way around (Jaeger et al., 2010). I don't really feel the ability to comment on this since monkeys, as well as the Eocene, are outside of my area of expertise. No, I wanted to compare the way two different blog posts on this same paper covered this paper, I am going to focus mainly on the headlines because this is where the two articles are the most different.

This first headline says this:

Instead Of Originating In Africa, Human Ancestors Colonized There From Asia, Says Study

This headline, from here, seems to imply that early relatives to humans, such as the hominids (yes I know I am pushing this back to the great apes), evolved in Asia. While this headline is not incorrect but perception is the key. My initial thought when I saw this was that it was about a paper that was going to claim that humans evolved in Asia and moved to Africa where we found them later. If I can make this mistake and I am a scientist who, mostly, understands human evolution imagine what a non-scientist would think. Part of what makes this worse is probably the fact that this post is part of a blogging community known as Scientific Blogging.

The other headline/article title reads:

Where did all these monkeys come from? – Fossil teeth may hint at an Asian origin for anthropoid primates

This title, from this article, leaves very little to the imagination, and if you want a good summary of the paper I recommend this article, and doesn't confuse you into thinking that humans evolved in Asia and then migrated to Africa. This particular article was written by Brian Switek who maybe one of the best science bloggers out there. I follow both of his blogs Laelaps and Dinosaur Tracking, and now the author of Written in Stone, and if you want to keep up on paleontology related papers I highly recommend both of them.

Ironically enough the Laelaps article ended like this:

Given how often news about fossil primates gets hyped and framed with “missing link” imagery, it is also worth considering how this story has hit the headlines. [...] Nevertheless, the Daily Mail gets off to a terribly start by pulling out that old bit of bullshit boilerplate “The human family tree may have to be rewritten” in the first line of their coverage before confusing themselves by trying to tie this discovery to the later origin of hominins over 30 million years later. In contrast, Dan Vergano of USA Today presents the story well, as does Ann Gibbons at Science NOW and Ewen Callaway at the Nature “Great Beyond” blog. For once, I don’t have very much to complain about!

You win some, you lose some I guess.

Reference

Jaeger, J., Beard, K., Chaimanee, Y., Salem, M., Benammi, M., Hlal, O., Coster, P., Bilal, A., Duringer, P., Schuster, M., Valentin, X., Marandat, B., Marivaux, L., Métais, E., Hammuda, O., & Brunet, M. (2010). Late middle Eocene epoch of Libya yields earliest known radiation of African anthropoids Nature, 467 (7319), 1095-1098 DOI: 10.1038/nature09425

Pterosaurs are pterosaurs

Recently a paper was published on a new pterosaur from the Dallas region of Texas (Myers, 2010). While an interesting find, I suggest you find the paper to read about it, I think the paper speaks for itself I wanted to blog about something else. I have read two different public articles about the paper and they both get it wrong.

The first one (found here) is a blog post from Scientific Blogging. Now I have stated in the past that I do enjoy the blogs on Scientific Blogging (see here, here, here, and here) but in this case they said something that made slap my own face.

The rare pterosaur — literally a winged lizard — is also one of the youngest members in the world of the family Ornithocheiridae, and only the second ornithocheirid ever documented in North America.

[emphasis mine]

Come on this is a scientific blog you are supposed to get this right. Lizards fall within the order Squamata and are more specifically within the Suborder of Lacertilia. While they are closely related to lizards, at least more so than they are to mammals, pterosaurs are not lizards. Pterosaurs are an order within the Archosaurs which actually puts them more closely related to crocodiles and dinosaurs than lizards.

So if a scientific blog can't get it right what chance do the nonscientific sources have? This next write up is from Fox News and was sent to me by my father. You don't have to get past the headline to see what is wrong with this article:

New Toothy, Flying Dino Discovered in Texas

Yes they call them dinosaurs and it gets better:

Evidence of these flying creatures has been rare in North America -- the newly identified Aetodactylus halli is only the second such dinosaur ever documented here, although toothed pterosaurs like it were common at the time elsewhere in the world.

Argh, come on people. While yes both dinosaurs and pterosaurs are members of Ornithodira they differ from there in many ways, not going to go in depth here because it would take to long, and some scientists say they shouldn't even be related this far down. This particular paragraph also makes it seem that pterosaurs, or worse yet dinosaurs, are rare in North America. If you read the actual paper neither one of those statements are what is argued in fact it they are just arguing that the ornithocheirid pterosaurs are rare in North America, in fact this is the second one of that clade found in North America. If they are arguing that dinosaurs are rare in Texas they are also wrong, also see Jacobs (1995).

So what conclusion can we draw from this? Scientists need to make sure that when interviewed we make sure to stress things like pterosaurs are not dinosaurs or lizards. We also need to make sure we do educated the general public when given the chance to point out things like this, because I am sure that most kids could tell you that pterosaurs are not dinosaurs nor are they lizards so we need to make sure we keep stressing this!

Sources

JACOBS, L. 1995. Lone Star Dinosaurs. Texas A& M University Press, College Station, 160 p.

MYERS, T. S. 2010. A new ornithocheirid pterosaur from the upper Cretaceous (Cenomanian-Turonian) Eagle Ford group of Texas. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 30(1):280-287.

Venomous Dinosaur?

Apparently at least according to the authors of a paper that is about to come out. Based upon this blog post (here) it is hard to tell exactly they have some evidence but nothing certain. I obviously haven't read the paper yet so I can't really say for sure till I do that.

It could always be worse:

Computer Software Design and Evolution

So I just came across this: http://www.scientificblogging.com/adaptive_complexity/intelligent_software_design_vs_evolution

It is a good read and does a really good job of refuting the same designer same material argument. There is one other thing that I would add and it is quite simply this. Yes most people only see a computer program going from 1.0-2.0 etc for most things like windows, however, if you ever look at the version of software such as Google Earth or AIM you will see that you end up with 4.95 before you finally get to version 5. You also often end up with beta versions of programs out on the market so that people can try them out and find out what works. Having done some programing work myself you will find that each program you make steps from the other ones you have done and you say well this works better. Then you keep looking and next time maybe you find something that works slightly better it is quite simply put evolution not creation.